Center
director Mark
Brysbaert looked at the first
500,000 results of the Ghent University's online vocabulary
test, focusing on differences in gender. Some words
exhibited a large margin between the percent of men and women who
reported knowing them.

In the online test, 100 letter sequences — which may or may not
be real English words — flash across the taker's screen.
Pressing the "f" or "j" keys, respectively, will indicate whether
the participant knows, but not necessarily understands, a
specific word. The test strongly penalized for marking you know a
word that doesn't exist.

We listed the words with the biggest recognition gap between
gender below, along with numbers in parenthesis showing the
percentage of men who knew the word followed by the percentage of
women.

Here are the words that men were most likely to recognize over
women:

codec (88, 48)

solenoid (87, 54)

golem (89, 56)

mach (93, 63)

humvee (88, 58)

claymore (87, 589

scimitar (86, 58)

kevlar (93, 65)

paladin (93, 66)

bolshevism (85, 60)

biped (86, 61)

dreadnought (90, 66)

And here are the words that women were most likely to know over
men:

taffeta (48, 87)

tresses (61, 93)

bottlebrush (58, 89)

flouncy (55, 86)

mascarpone (60, 90)

decoupage (56, 86)

progesterone (63, 92)

wisteria (61, 89)

taupe (66, 93)

flouncing (67, 94)

peony (70, 96)

bodice (71, 96)

The male words tend to center on transportation, weapons, and
science, while the female words mostly relate to fashion, art,
and flowers.

Preconceived
notions prevail, we guess. The commenters on the Reddit thread,
however, introduced some valid counterpoints.